Adobe plans to make Photoshop on the web free to all users
Adobe has started testing a free-to-use version of Photoshop on the web and plans to open the service up to everyone as a way to introduce more users to the app, The Verge reports.
The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
“We want to make [Photoshop] more accessible and easier for more people to try it out and experience the product,” says Maria Yap, Adobe’s VP of digital imaging.
Adobe first released its web version of Photoshop in October, delivering a simplified version of the app that could be used to handle basic edits. Layers and core editing tools made the jump, but the service didn’t come anywhere close to including the app’s full breadth of features. Instead, Adobe framed it primarily as a collaboration tool — a way for an artist to share an image with others and have them jump in, leave some annotations and make a couple small tweaks, and hand it back over.
In the months since, Adobe has made a handful of updates to the service, and it’s also started to open it up beyond collaboration use cases. Before, someone had to share a document to the web from the desktop app, but now, any Photoshop subscriber can log in and start a new document straight from the web.